31 May 2018, Rome - FAO, acting as Biodiversity Mainstreaming Platform, can help shift agricultural production onto a more sustainable track -- one that promotes healthy and thriving ecosystems while also producing ample and nutritious food for a growing global population. At the close of a three-day meeting (29-31 May) convened to discuss the work of the Platform, a group of 250 Ministers, policymakers, experts, and private and civil society representatives provided a number of suggestions for the Organization's future work on biodiversity.

To slow the evolutionary progression of weeds and insect pests gaining resistance to herbicides and pesticides, policymakers should provide resources for large-scale, landscape-level studies of a number of promising but untested approaches for slowing pest evolution. Such landscape studies are now more feasible because of new genomic and technological innovations that could be used to compare the efficacy of strategies for preventing weed and insect resistance.

Hunting dogs as possible vectors for the infectious disease tularaemia

Tularaemia is an infectious bacterial disease that is life-threatening for rodents, rabbits and hares, but which can also infect humans and dogs. While contact with contaminated blood or meat makes hunters a high-risk group, the frequency of infections among hunting dogs has not been much studied. Researchers from Vetmeduni Vienna have now confirmed a relevant prevalence of infections in Austrian hunting dogs following a serological study in which seven percent of the animals tested positive. This could lead to more intense debate as to whether the often asymptomatic animals represent an additional risk of infection for people

More than half of Europe's forests have disappeared over the past 6,000 years thanks to increasing demand for agricultural land and the use of wood as a source of fuel, new research led by the University of Plymouth suggests.